[1682] E. M. O. (1599), ind. 425, ‘Let me neuer liue to looke as highe as the two-pennie roome, againe’; T. Garzoni, Hospitall of Incurable Fooles (tr. 1600), epist., ‘a Player that in speaking an Epilogue makes loue to the two pennie roume for a plaudite’; Satiromastix (1602), epil. 2690, ‘Are you pleas’d?... if you be not, by’th Lord Ile see you all—heere for your two pence a peice agen before Ile loose your company.... Good night, my two-penny Tenants’; Mad World, my Masters (c. 1604–6), v. ii. 36, ‘some ... that ... took a good conceit of their parts into th’ two-penny room’; Woman Hater (1607), prol. 5, ‘I do pronounce this, to the utter discomfort of all two-penny Gallery men, you shall have no bawdery’; Fleire (1607), ii. 30, ‘They (like your common players) let men come in for twopence a peece’; Dekker, News from Hell (1606, Works, ii. 96), ‘You may take him ... in the afternoones, in the twopeny roomes of a Play-house, like a Puny, seated Cheeke by Iowle with a punke’, Seven Deadly Sins (1606, ii. 53), ‘Sloth ... will come and sit in the two-pennie galleries amongst the gentlemen, and see their knaveries and their pastimes’, The Dead Term (1608, iv. 55), ‘Players ... prostitute themselues to the pleasures of euery two-penny drunken Plebeian’, Lanthorn and Candle-Light (1608, iii. 216), ‘Pay thy twopence to a Player, in his gallerie maist thou sitte by a Harlot’, Raven’s Almanac (1609, iv. 184), ‘As if you sat in the moste perspicuous place of the two-penny gallerie in a play-house’; Roaring Girl (1611), v. 1, ‘One of them is a nip; I took him once i’ the two-penny gallerie at the Fortune’; &c., &c.
[1683] Dekker, Seven Deadly Sins (1606, Works, ii. 53), ‘Their houses smoakt euery after noone with Stinkards who were so glewed together in crowdes with the steames of strong breath, that when they came foorth, their faces lookt as if they had beene per boyld’, Raven’s Almanac (1609, iv. 194), ‘Hee shall be glad to play three houres for two pence to the basest stinkard in London, whose breth is stronger than garlicke, and able to poison all the twelve penny roomes’, Work for Armourers (1609, iv. 96), ‘tearme times, when the Twopeny Clients and Peny Stinkards swarme together to heere the Stagerites’; vide n. 2, infra, and p. 534, n. 1.
[1684] Satiromastix (1602), 1669, ‘a Gentleman or an honest Cittizen shall not sit in your pennie-bench Theaters, with his Squirrell by his side cracking nuttes ... but he shall be Satyr’d and Epigram’d vpon’; T. M. Black Book (1604), ‘penny-rooms at theatres’; T. M. Ant and Nightingale (1604), ‘stinkards sitting in the penny galleries of a theatre, and yawning upon the players’; Dekker, Gull’s Horn Book (1609, Works, ii. 208), ‘thou ... hast vouchsafed to be acquainted with penny galleries’; Wit Without Money (c. 1614), iv. 1, ‘break in at plays like prentices for three a groat, and crack nuts with the scholars in peny rooms again’.
[1685] A. Copley, Wits, Fits and Fancies (1595; ed. 1614, p. 124), tells of a man cast off by his brother, an actor, who sent him sixpence in a sheet of paper, to show that, ‘though his brother had vowed not in seven years to see him, yet he for his sixpence could come and see him upon the stage at his pleasure’. If Platter’s 3d. was the highest normal charge in the sixteenth century, the 6d. may represent a first night’s charge.
[1686] Most of the allusions to 6d. charges relate to private houses (cf. p. 556), but Beaumont’s grammar lecture (cf. ch. xxiii) gives this price for the Bankside, and T. M. Black Book (1604, Bullen, Middleton, viii. 41) has ‘I give and bequeath to you Benedick Bottomless, most deep cut-purse, all the benefit of ... the sixpenny rooms in play-places, to cut, dive and nim’. Later, The Actors Remonstrance (1643) professes that the players will not admit into their ‘sixpenny rooms those unwholesome enticing harlots that sit there merely to be taken up by prentices or lawyers’ clerks’; cf. Lawrence, i. 36, who thinks that the lord’s rooms became the sixpenny rooms. For the 1s. charge, cf. p. 533, n. 1, and Malcontent (1604), ind. 63, ‘I say, any man that hath wit may censure, if he sit in the twelve-penny room’; Dekker, G. H. B. (1609), ‘When at a new play you take up the twelve-penny rome next the stage; (because the Lords and you may seeme to be haile fellow wel-met) there draw forth this booke, read alowd, laugh alowd, and play the Antickes, that all the garlike mouthed stinkards may cry out, Away with the fool’; Hen. VIII (1613), prol., ‘may see away their shilling’; Overbury, Characters (ed. Rimbault, 154, The Proud Man), ‘If he have but twelvepence in ’s purse he will give it for the best room in a play-house’.
[1687] They include women, and certainly look more like spectators than actors or musicians.
[1688] E. Guilpin, Skialetheia (1598), ep. 53:
See you him yonder, who sits o’re the stage,
With the Tobacco-pipe now at his mouth?
In E. M. O. (1599), 1390 (Q1), Brisk is said to speak of lords ‘as familiarlie as if hee had ... ta’ne tabacco with them ouer the stage i’ the Lords roome’. Dekker-Wilkins, Jests to Make you Merry (1607, Works, ii. 292), has a jest of ‘one that sat ouer the stage’ on a wench in the two-penny room. Farmer-Chetham MS. (seventeenth-century, ed. Grosart, i. 104) has an epigram on Spongus, who ‘Plays at Primero over the stage’.